Easy recipe for a hearty, easy-to-make soup with authentic Mexican colors and ingredients: chick peas (garbanzo beans), potatoes, tomatoes, and delicious, nutritious cactus pieces.
Vegetarian
The Nopal, an Edible Cactus
Nopal cactus pads have been consumed in Mexico since time immemorial. They are an excellent-tasting and very nutritious vegetable that is easy to grow in arid climates unsuitable for a lot of other agriculture.
Corpus Christi Salad
Robin: This salad, known as Ensalada de Corpus in Mexico, is a celebratory combination of some of the important fruits and vegetables that come into season in spring and early summer in the agricultural areas of central Mexico. The recipe calls for ingredients that are seldom used together (when’s the last time you mixed squash and peaches?) but which…
Chile de Arbol Sauce (Salsa de chile de árbol en aceite)
Robin: Although I am enthusiastic about many recipes, very few of them excite me as much as this one does. This spicy table sauce is a classic in Mexico for adding life and flavor to pozole and other soups, but it´s just as good on breakfast eggs, fried or grilled meats, or any corn-based or…
Rhubarb Ice Pops
Robin: While I was growing up, rhubarb wasn´t really part of my life. I´d heard of it, tried it a time or two in pie (and hadn´t thought particularly highly of it), but it just seemed like a boring olden days thing that old timers talked about. I guess it didn´t help that said old…
Peruvian Pumpkin Stew (Locro de zapallo)
Robin: Peru is a great country for comfort foods. It is, after all, the birthplace of the potato, a tuber that is high on most people’s list of soothing ingredients. Inhabitants of the Andes are also the creators of many one-pot, carb-rich meals, and what could be cozier than that? A locro is a warming,…
Sweet and Sour Pasta Veggie Salad
Robin: I could very well have named it “surprise salad” to reflect the way people often react when they first taste it: despite its rather insipid appearance, this pasta salad is loaded with flavor. Folks see a mild-mannered pasta salad and expect something, well, ho-hum at best—but once they take a bite, it’s a party…
Sonoran Cheese and Potato Soup (Caldo de queso y papa)
Robin: This lovely dish from northern Mexico is delightfully different from most other soups with similar ingredients. It contains potatoes, but is not thick; it calls for milk, but is not a cream soup, there is cheese in it, but the cheese does not melt. In fact, a fresh, white queso panela or queso fresco…
Lentil Soup
Robin: I learned to make this in Mexico, but very similar lentil dishes can be found all over Latin America, since it was the Spanish and Portuguese who brought this valuable, nutritious legume to our part of the world. In Mexico, lentil soup would probably be served in small portions as the first course to…
Cheese Cracklings (Chicharrón de queso)
Robin: You know that little bit of cheese that oozes out of a grilled cheese sandwich and drips down onto the surface of the pan, where it gets crispy and almost-but-not-quite burns before you scrape it off and pop it into your mouth? It’s sooooo delicious, the very best bite of the whole meal, to…